The new Exorcist movie is going to suck. I'm sure of it, and I'll tell you why. William Friedkin will not be directing it, and William Peter Blatty will not be writing it. Renny Harlin is the director of Exorcist: The Beginning, and if his previous films are any indication (Cliffhanger, Deep Blue Sea), there will be lots of sinewy, muscled men and women who must take their clothes off for reasons of safety. In other words, this newest foray into demon possession may be a deliciously bad flick, but it definitely, absolutely, positively will not be a good one.

Believe it or not, I only saw The Exorcist about four years ago, when they re-released it into the theaters. I figured the film would be so dated, so hokey, that it would have very little effect on me. Maybe I could even laugh my way through it. Turns out, the only truly funny thing was how sorely I had misjudged this movie. It did, in fact, scare the hell out of me.

Mostly, I attribute The Exorcist's longevity to the unusual combination of intellect, emotion, and deft eeriness cultivated by the film. The story is engaging on a number of levels. First of all, there's a lot of humanity to it. The characters are fully dimensional; they are much more than the typical robotic caricatures, which make such a shallow impression that the audience doesn't care when Jason or Freddy catches up to them. (Most horror films these days are like flashy little vehicles that run on carnage and produce an enormous stench.) Second—and this surprised me—this movie is as much about class disparities as anything. We see a working class priest, who doesn't have the funds to place his senile mother in a good nursing home. She ends up in an asylum instead. Later, we see a wealthy actress bringing her disturbed daughter to every specialist in the country, searching for answers. The girl is treated with the latest technology, and the doctors all have an enlightened approach toward mental health. It's like the two families are living in different times. But then comes the great equalizer—Satan. Makes me wonder if anyone has ever included a discussion of The Exorcist in their dissertation on the principles of Marxism.

Sure, the head spinning around looks silly—it's been parodied too many times not to—but there's such a sense of menace hanging over the film that you can never even relax enough to emit a nervous laugh. Most artfully, the movie toys with your anticipation, exploiting the underrated conceit that what you can't see is always scarier than what you can. This is what my nightmares were like as a child—something not quite glimpsed that disappears around the corner, disembodied laughter, a feeling of wrongness when you walk into a room. The demons in your own imagination can torment you better than whatever gory abomination the filmmaker throws onto the screen. Good horror films make you do it to yourself.

Other movies and books that have scared me enough to keep me awake at night include:

Stephen King's rapturously creepy novel, Pet Sematary. Again, the effect is largely due to the emotion that fuels the characters' choices. All of us have lost pets and relatives, haven't we? In the depths of grief, wouldn't we have done anything to have them back, even if we knew they wouldn't be the same upon their return? This emotional resonance gives the story a sense of inevitability, like a runaway train that always ends at the same terrible destination.

Ringu. This is the Japanese horror classic that inspired the American film, The Ring. Ringu was outrageous and funny, especially in translation. But then there was that tape . . . . The tape that causes all the ruckus in the film is full of bizarre, surrealist images, and although these images are not logical, they are nevertheless disturbing on a primal level. Sure enough, when I got in bed that night, I could not stop thinking about that gangly girl with the long hair combed over her face, crawling slowly towards—then out of—my television screen. When the lights went out, I imagined her crawling through the living room, hallway and, finally, the bedroom. So I stayed awake. I played Tetris until the sun came up again. And I'll admit something further. When a full seven days went by without incident, I breathed a secret sigh of relief.

This business with the TV recalls a lesser known horror film, Videodrome, starring Debbie Harry and directed by David Cronenberg. The plot in a nutshell: there's a snuff TV show called Videodrome that causes hallucinations and brain damage in the people who watch it. Also stars a young James Woods as the bumbling everyman who must stop the people behind this abomination. Oh, and there's a character named Bianca O'Blivion. Doesn't get better than that.

Kubrick's The Shining. I've heard that Stephen King hated—I mean really hated—this movie. The focus on alcoholism as the true killer wasn't there, and he thought Nicholson was way over the top. The first may be true, but the film certainly gives a grimly accurate portrait of what it means to be in an abusive family, depicting everything from the excuse-making to the violent, irrational outbursts. Even before the crazy sets in, it's clear that Jack Torrance is pretty disturbed. So when you hear the Dysfunctional Trio is going to be holed up together in the hotel of doom, you just know it's going to be bad bad bad. It's this set-up that makes the hotel scenes so alarming. In particular, the twin girls scared me; the blood pouring from the elevator scared me; the naked woman in the shower scared me—even more once she was covered with pustules and boils; and the scenes where Jack stares off into space with a demented grin on his face scared me. It's all classically creepy, except for the part at the end where Shelley Duvall runs around the hotel in a panic and seemingly stumbles onto the set of Evil Dead: 3 1/2. How did that crap with the skeletons get in there? Did Kubrick owe somebody a favor? This kind of effect is much more at home in a movie like Mars Attacks!. As for Nicholson being over the top? Not on your life. Well, okay, maybe. A bit.

Jay Anson's Amityville Horror. This book frightened me enough that I had to stop halfway through. To this day, I have not finished it. The stuff with the pig, the blood oozing from the walls . . . . you know what? I'm not going to finish this item, either.

Event Horizon. I cannot express how terrified I was on first watching this film, especially since I was expecting it to be a happy-go-lucky space adventure movie. (Danger, Will Robinson!) It was promising to begin with. There was the regal Laurence Fishburne, the willowy Joely Richardson, the pudgy Sam Neill. But then the movie went to hell. Literally. Before I knew what was happening, the screen was filled with gore and ghosts and corpsesicles. There was a commander inexplicably speaking in Latin while his crew tore each other to pieces ("Liberate tutame ex inferis"). About the time Sam Neill's wife showed up without any eyeballs, I shut my own eyes as tightly as I could, thinking this would somehow lessen the terror. It only made things worse. The sounds from the screen collaborated with my brain to project the nightmare of the century onto the back of my eyelids. In the end, I was so spooked I had to sleep on my neighbor's floor.

About a year ago, the SciFi channel started broadcasting this film incessantly, and I made a point of watching it every time, hoping overexposure would blunt its effect on me. This homemade therapy has had some effect: namely, I now know the dialogue by heart, and I can avert my eyes during the gory, evil-universe scenes I don't wish to see again.

But I still can't watch it alone.